JESUS is the most puzzling and paradoxical personality of our human history.
Although the peculiar character of his genius made him a son of the East,
it is in the West that his person has had its strange fates and fortunes.
Jesus has had a double history: on the one hand, the plain prosaic career
of the prophet-preacher of Galilee; on the other hand, the triumphant Son
of God to whom the Western World has attached its religious hopes. The Jesus
of history was a genuine child of the Jewish people with the blood of ancient
Syria in his veins, but in the faith of his followers he became Westernized.
The Christ of faith, body and soul, is the product of Western piety. Christianity
had its birth in the homeland of Jesus, but the very disposition to see in
him a religious object is Greek rather than Galilean. The Christ of faith
was girded for a career in the world on Greek soil and was clothed in full
splendor by the Greek intellect and imagination. Even Paul was more Greek
than Jew in his conception of the person of Christ. The history of Christianity
is simply the story of the gradual suppression of Galilee by Greece. Galilee
has never been much more than the scene of a pleasant pastoral idyl, a sort
of soothing prologue that failed to set the theme for the great drama that
was enacted in the West.

GALILEE AND GREECE

From one point of view, it seems strange that Jesus should be reckoned among
the great. judged by the
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outward phases of his life and work, there is nothing specially striking or
remarkable in his historical appearance. He lived his life to the early maturity
of the East in the little village of Nazareth of Galilee without leaving upon
the village folk the impression either of growing wisdom or of promising personal
powers. He left private life for engagement in his public work, "In the fifteenth
year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea,
and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the
region of Iturea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, in the
highpriesthood of Annas and Caiaphas." (Luke 3,1-2a.)

Such is the most elaborate historical setting which one of the few records
that have come down to us gives for his public life and work.
Jesus' public work confined itself to his own native land, a small and remote
province of the Roman Empire. He never came into contact with the life of
the world at large as did his great protagonist, Paul. He attracted little
or no attention in the world of his day and was practically unknown beyond
the borders of Galilee prior to the last week of his life. Contemporary Roman
and Jewish historians accord him at best not more than sporadic, usually doubtful
mentions of his name. What we know of him in the way of literary records was
produced and preserved by his followers.

Jesus died a young man, probably not more than thirty years of age. He did
not have a long, but an abruptly short career, probably a few months in length.
Approximately the last year of his life he spent in public.
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Although he confined his work to his own people, he did not win them to his
cause and he came to influence but few of his contemporaries. His work in
the capital of his nation was brought to a tragic end within the space of
a week. He did not die, as other great men have, with his followers numbering
thousands, hundreds or even scores. His personally chosen circle of companions
fled from the scene of his arrest after one of the trusted twelve had betrayed
him into the hands of his enemies. Only a few faithful women from among his
following witnessed his death and burial.

Such are the prosaic aspects of Jesus' historical appearance. Yet from another
and more familiar point of view, the fates and fortunes of the person of no
man are comparable to those of the person of Jesus, nor has the influence
of any man on our Western life been so imposing and ineradicable. "Jesus lives
in humanity to an extent and in a way never experienced by any other human
being."' In the history of Christianity, at some time or other, there has
not been a major concern of man's life, hardly a minor concern, whether joyous
or sorrowful, hopeful or full of fear, that has not been attended by sincere
invocations through and to him. Over against the prosaic features of Jesus'
historical appearance stands an ancient and triumphant religious faith that
attaches itself to him and of which he was at once the object, a faith that,
paradoxically enough, produced and preserved this prosaic account in which
it felt itself enriched and which in turn it enhanced.

The figure of the Nazarene has always had about it a peculiar and invincible
fascination that has increased
274
rather than diminished with the passing of even long periods of time. Through
nineteen centuries Jesus has been the source of a strange stimulation for
the religious imagination, one of the most potent factors in the life of individuals
and institutions. To the ever-growing portrait of Jesus each people that has
accepted Christianity has contributed of its native genius. Each has offered
tribute of its best talent-art, poetry, music, philosophy, even mythology.
About his head each has cast its own glorious halo and crown, the last more
splendid than the rest.

The historical expressions of Christian experience are most multiform and
of infinite variety. Every principal phenomenon known in the history of religion,
primitive or cultured, has appeared in Christian worship. A great, highly-organized
and powerful institution claims Jesus for its very own, as its founder and
perfecter, and it feels itself commissioned by him as the guardian of his
cause and faith. There are signs, symbols, images, formulas, prayers, incantations,
liturgies, benedictions, consecrations, celebrations, mysteries, sacraments,
sacred rites, rituals, confessions, creeds, high services, holy performances,
hymns, rhythmic chants, offerings, contributions, whole calendars of feast
and holy days-all in the name, honor and worship of Jesus. All constitute
a tremendous tribute to him and originally all were endowed with the most
treasured sentiments and emotions of the Christian consciousness. Yet the
whole array presents an elaborate system of religious worship, whether Catholic
or Protestant, quite far removed from the simple scenes in the Galilean synagogues,
quite unlike the prophet of the kingdom of God who preached on the mountain,
by the countryside, from fishing boats, in village streets and
275
marketplaces, and who himself sought out the silence and seclusion of the
desert solitude to pray to his God. When one reads the simple New Testament
story of Jesus and then surveys simply the objective side of Christianity's
history and development, the very proportions of the final issue are almost
inconceivable. A Galilean witness of Jesus' ministry could not believe his
eyes if he were permitted to see.

If we turn to the subjective side of Christianity's history, to the development
of its mind and faith, the outcome is even more amazing. "Christianity has
had a history as has no other religion."" At a surprisingly early date it
won its way as the official religion of the Western 'World. In the course
of its triumphant march from East to West it wrought radical changes and made
remarkable contributions to the life of whole nations and peoples. But Christianity
did not emerge from this process unscathed, and the changes wrought in itself
are quite as radical and remarkable as those it was able to effect. In its
history, early and late, the Christian faith has gone through various developments,
transitions, alterations, eliminations, additions, accretions, outgrowths,
aftergrowths and overgrowths which separate and distinguish it very clearly
from the simple yet profound faith that possessed the soul of Jesus.

The person of Jesus became the perennial source of speculation wherever Christianity
struck permanent root. About his person there evolved great systems of thought,
elaborate and intricate structures of belief, theologies and Christologies,
schemes of salvation, doctrines and dogmas, creeds and confessions. Faith
became fixed and
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formal; beliefs became impersonal and official, and with officiality of belief
came orthodoxy of opinion. The historical Jesus was enveloped in a mystical,
mythical and metaphysical atmosphere that hid him from the eyes of even the
believing Christian world. Theology and philosophy in Christian garb overgrew
and obscured the religion of Jesus, the simple yet strong sources of spiritual
life which he knew. There came, what Professor Rufus M. Jones has called,
"the profound transformation of Christianity from a way of life to an elaborate
system of thought." 114
By the third century Greece had submerged the homeland, and the religion that
named itself after a Galilean and that claimed him for its founder had left
of him little more than a highly exalted but lifeless figure. Every historical
student of first-century Christianity knows that the Greek mind, when it was
turned to Christianity, did not cease to think Greek and that the great body
of Christian theology and Christology is the free and spontaneous reaction
of the Greek genius to the Christian message, the natural outgrowth of Greek
thought turned with fervor to a new object of religious faith. As Christianity
came into new intellectual atmospheres it experienced fresh expansions of
life; as it struck root in different psychic soils it developed outgrowths
that were perfectly natural and that are perfectly intelligible to the historical
student. But the development of the faith that attached itself to God's great
Galilean went so far that only those who are trained by tradition can recognize
the Jesus of history in the Christ of faith.

It is at this point that the unnatural element appears.
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Christianity's expansions brought shifts in the centers of emphasis; natural
outgrowths became unnatural overgrowths; accretions submerged the original
acumen; later developments gradually eliminated the primitive intrinsic 'deposit.
And these acquired elements became more impressive for the Christian imagination,
official and lay, than the plain prosaic picture presented in the first three
Gospels. They gradually usurped the seats of authority in Christian thinking
and feeling; they were accepted as the criterions of infallible faith, and
unquestioning loyalty was vouchsafed as the guarantee of religious certainty.
At not a few points in Christianity's history Jesus has been lost to the church
so far as the things that meant most to him were concerned. In the tumult
of its theoretical tributes Christianity has often stood in danger of losing
Jesus himself. Exalted estimates of his person have obscured the cause to
which he felt himself called and to which he committed himself without reserve;
controversies over titles befitting his dignity have often grossly contradicted
the simple sincerity of his spirit; and both have raised a barrier in the
way of the work he sought to accomplish-the kingdom of God among men.

The common idea is that Jesus founded a religion--Christianity. But it is
better history to say: Jesus became a religion. Christianity from the moment
of its birth was a religion about Jesus rather than the religion of Jesus.
The personal piety of Jesus has played practically no role, at least no regulative
role, in the history of official and organized Christianity. For the general
thought of the church, his appearance in history has been primarily an act
in the great divine drama of salvation. The exalted elevation and enrichment
of man's religious experience, the close approach of man to an adequate
278
understanding and knowledge of his Maker, the infinite contribution to our
common human problem of religious living, which came in the form of the personal
religious experience of Jesus, have never been commanding centers of interest
and emphasis. Instead there has always been a subtle swinging away from this
best source of spiritual supply. But the history of religion seems to teach
that the priest supplants the prophet, that the institution submerges the
individual whose genius gave it birth. Such, it seems, is the fate of any
social movement that dares gird itself for a career in the world and that
commits itself to the great currents of culture and civilization. There is,
always, it seems, a slow seeping away of the original sources of strength,
a subtle stagnation of spirit , a growing weariness and a gradual weakening
of the will to work its original and genial way, a shift in the centers of
interest and emphasis in the face of new conditions, concessions and compromises
that at the outset would have been unthinkable, changes within, influences
from without-all resulting in something quite foreign to the first faith.

Such is the strange and paradoxical picture which the history of Christianity
and its faith presents. On the one hand, a plain peasant prophet, a Iay preacher
of the kingdom of God, a religious subject in possession of the richest and
most resourceful religious experience of which we have any knowledge. On the
other hand, the Risen Lord, the Christ, the Son, very God, the center of a
religious faith, the object of religious reverence. The cardinal claims of
the Christian faith are something quite different from anything we hear from
Jesus himself. As a matter of the best attested historical fact, Jesus kept
his own person so completely in the background that we are
279
not in a position to say exactly what and how he esteemed himself, except
as the called and commissioned prophet of the kingdom of God. But as a matter
of historical fact also, the person of Jesus occupies, as it has from the
very first, the whole foreground of Christian thought. All else sinks into
the hardly visible background, including some of the things for which he staked
his all.

An infinite number of attempts have been made to reconcile the old alternative
set by Strauss in 1835: The Jesus of history or the Christ of Faith.
Theological prejudice has reconciled it because it has never perceived it.
Vital religious faith has felt it, yet as is faith's peculiar privilege it
has seemed to prosper in its presence. That vital religion can thrive in the
midst of the most perplexing paradoxes between faith and fact is clear in
the religious experience of Jesus himself. But when it comes to the matter
of historical fact, to the question of sources and standards of authority
in the Christian faith, the old alternative of Strauss is as live as ever
after more than ninety years. It is clearer and more certain than ever because
we now know more about Jesus and the beginnings of the early Christian faith
that attached itself to him. In such a recent and important work as Professor
Otto's Das Heilige the old issue is restated: "Is Christianity in general
and in the strict sense the religion of Jesus?"" In the Zeitschrift fuer
Theologie und Kirche we find an elaborate article on "The Christ of Faith
and the Historical Jesus," by Professor Mundle, who frames the issue more
incisively than ever.

The issue will not down for it is too deeply imbedded in the New Testament
itself. Over against the religious
280
experience of Jesus there is something quantitatively great, something qualitatively
new in the religious experience of the first Christians. In the New Testament
itself it is quite clear that Jesus was something more and different in early
Christian experience, something infinitely more and different, than he professed
to be for his contemporaries in general, for his intimate companions in particular,
indeed, something infinitely more and different than the content of his own
self-consciousness exhibits so far as this is accessible to us. In his own
experience he was a religious subject, but in the experience of the earliest
Christians he was always a religious object. As such he gave to the Christian
faith its distinctive character and content.

Jesus did not have followers as have other great men of history, even founders
of religions. who came to influ. ence subsequent generations. Other great
men have had followers who took up their work where they were forced to leave
it off. They have carried it on, seeking to be true to their master's spirit
and to accomplish what he had seen by faith. The followers of other great
men have championed their master's cause, preached and propagated his message,
taught and expounded the things that he thought and taught. The followers
of Jesus did none of these things. They did not take up his work where he
was forced to leave it off. They did not propagate his distinctive message.
The New Testament itself is not made up of injunctions of Jesus but of faith's
fervent interpretations of his person. Outside of the first three Gospels
there are not in the New Testament more than a dozen sentences from his religious
message. The first Christians preached Jesus himself. Jesus had his own message,
the kingdom of God, and the early Christians
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had their own distinctive message, Jesus himself, to whom they attached the
whole body of their religious hopes.

Between the religious experience of Jesus and that of the first Christians
there is a complete shift in the centers of interest and emphasis. What Jesus
guarded as a sacred secret within the inner recesses of his own consciousness,
the first Christians announced to the world as the sole hope of religious
salvation. How it was that this shift from religious subject to religious
object, from the Jesus of history to the Christ of faith, came about we are
not in a position to explain, but it stands as a clear fact in the testimony
of the New Testament itself. It goes back to the first faint dawning of the
Christian consciousness and it had its birth in the Easter experiences of
the original witnesses. Jesus as religious object was inherent in the resurrection
faith of the first witnesses. Thus, the most radical change came at the very
outset.

Theologies and Christologies required time for formation and formulation,
but faith in Jesus as religious object was the work of a moment. It transpired
with a flash because it was the one ignition point in the experience of those
who claimed that Jesus was alive and that they had seen him. Long before the
Gospels were written the Christian faith had received its distinctive features
which later were to mark it as a new religion. The belief in Jesus' Messiahship,
his divine dignity, and his present exaltation and glorification, was a fixed
element that reached back beyond Paul to the resurrection faith of the first
witnesses. Paul did not create the Christian faith in Jesus as a religious
object. He speaks of himself as the last of the Easter experients. (I Cor.
15,8.) Paul
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was simply the sharer of a faith that was older than his own Christian experience.

In the history of Christianity, from the first Easter morning down to the
present, we see the Christ of faith gradually suppressing the Jesus of history,
the supernatural and superhistorical object of the Christian faith slowly
but surely submerging the human historical subject of the richest religious
experience of which we know. This process was only natural, for it was the
involuntary outgrowth of the experiences of the first disciples at the center
of whose lives stood the firm conviction that Jesus was not dead but lived
and that they had seen him. This process of obscuration is at work in the
New Testament itself and there it has already accomplished this great shift
from religious subject to religious object.

THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
OF JESUS AND THEOLOGY

In the past Jesus has been approached almost exclusively from the theological
point of view. Each word of his, each incident in his life, has been fitted
into the great systems of Christian thought. Until the last century the Christian
interest in what Jesus said and did confined itself to a quest for confirmation
of theological theories in his words and deeds. This theological approach
reaches back to the New Testament itself and it has invaded even the thought
of Jesus. An excellent example of this is found in Mark 10,45: "For the Son
of man also came not to be ministered
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unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many."

In the first part of this passage we have a genuine word of Jesus, the very
essence of whose mission was not to be ministered unto, but to minister. However,
the closing clause is a Christian conviction cast about the death of Jesus.
That it is of Christian origin is clear from the fact that it looks back on
his life as closed; it surveys and appraises his work as a whole. It presents
a Christian interpretation rather than a personal conviction of Jesus, who
did not regard his death as a part of a great divine drama. His fate was his
own personal problem, a pressing perplexity of his own religious loyalty,
which he solved in the light of the divine will for himself. Mark 10,45 must
be read in the light of Jesus' Gethsemane prayer in which he casts no reflection
concerning the significance of his suffering and death for later believers.

Christian theology has seemed to aim at system rather than at a sharing of
Jesus' religious experience. At times it has been so systematic that little
indeed of his own originality has been left. Traditional theology has never
had the right disposition toward Jesus, and no matter how refined and how
carefully stated, its formulations will never be able to do him justice, for
theology is always more interested in itself than it is in Jesus. Theologians
have never seemed to want to be near Jesus as he actually was, to be in his
company and to enjoy his companionship. They have exalted him to a towering
throne. Between him and us yawns that impassable gulf that separates dignified
deity from humble humanity. The historical stu-
284
dent who repeats the official creed, as he naturally does because he feels
that he senses and shares the religious convictions out of which it came,
can not escape the feeling that theology has missed the cardinal centers of
Jesus' own religious experience, that it has neglected the religious Jesus
almost entirely or has so covered him with theological tributes that he is
no longer one of us. This theological Jesus was not the man of Galilee; in
fact, the Jesus of theology never existed and by his very nature could not
exist, for he is too far removed from a serious sharing of historical and
human conditions. The Jesus of Matthew and Mark and Luke is a wholly different
figure. He is real in the strict sense. He appears as a man among men. His
closest friends are human persons of surprising simplicity, yet he is one
of them. They thrill at his touch, grow in the presence of his gracious goodness,
learn from his lips the ways of God, and respond to the imposing power of
his personality. Theological pride can take no pleasure in such a prosaic
picture.

The historical Jesus was most untheological. There is nothing intricate or
involved in his religious thinking. In the first three Gospels we have no
record of Jesus' delivering a doctrinal discourse or of his discussing some
'technical theological theme. Without exception, he preached the personal
and practical phases of piety--religion as it relates itself organically to
the creation of character and the control of conduct. We never find him in
a technical theological controversy so characteristic of the religious leaders
of his day and people. In his con-
285
flicts with the religious authorities he contends for the elemental over against
the elaborate in religion.

With his contemporaries Jesus does not seem to have left the impression of
formal learning. Nevertheless, he spoke "with authority," as one who speaks
out of great conviction and deep inner certainty. Thus he found his way to
the hearts of his hearers as a display of learning would never have been able
to do. Jesus had no systematic theology. His only theology was theologia experimentalis.
Jesus stands as the disappointment and dismay of all those who seek careful
formulation and system in religious thinking. Theology is not religion. If
it were, we to-day would have little to hope for in turning to him. Jesus
gives no theological instruction, rather he imparts religious inspiration.
He thought and spoke too much to the point, too little at length, to frame
his faith in a formal structure. Nowhere do we see him searching for terms
that draw the usual careful distinctions in the treatment of theological themes.
His utterances strike at the very heart of religious problems, yet they have
all the natural variety that belongs to a vital and vigorous faith. His longest
addresses in the first three Gospels are brief enough, and they show no interest
in either a full or a formal treatment of a theme.

Jesus never makes even an approach to anything like a formal and full statement
of his faith. The Lord's Prayer is the nearest approach to such. Here within
compact compass we have the great religious beliefs of Jesus, not doctrines
and dogmas but vital religious f aith. As we raw, it is the finest fruition
of his prayer-experience. Now we may say that it is the finest and fullest
fruition of the whole of his religious experience, of all that he found God
to be and to mean for our humankind. It is his greatest
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and most significant utterance. It is the richest single deposit of his faith,
and into it the whole of his religious life is emptied. In view of its remarkable
freedom from those side-issues that so readily distract and distort the religious
outlook, in view of its brevity and comprehensiveness, we might speak of it
as the creed of Jesus. It is his creed in the sense that it presents what
he regarded as of most matter before God. But it is not a creed in the sense
that would make it a formal statement of the substance of his religious faith.
It should be the great creed of Christianity, and if the authority of Jesus
were actual rather than theoretical with us, it would be our one great confession
of faith. Of the Lord's Prayer, Professor Wernle writes: "A more simple, a
more confident prayer certainly has never been uttered. . . . It is the greatest
and grandest confession of all Christian churches, the only thing that can
not separate and that can bind together, the only thing that confronts us
with the one great issue upon which all else depends."

A thorough reading of the first three Gospels will tekch us emphatically enough
that Jesus was not a theologian and that from him we may expect no formal
theology. As Professor Weinel writes: "Jesus had no theology; he was an unschooled
man of action."" In his experience of religion he was closer to life than
formal theology can ever hope to be. He was the bitter opponent of a piety
that based itself on learning rather than on living. It was in a religion
of traditionalism that he saw the greatest danger to the divine cause. He
speaks of the theologians of his day as blind leaders of the blind; both shall
fall into the ditch. He was unremitting in
287
his arraignment of those for whom conceptions about religion had obscured
and submerged religion itself. It was not in the religious constitution of
Jesus to accept or to advocate a divinely-revealed, a God-given dogma or fixed
objective standard of religious truth. Above all tradition he sets the authority
of personal religious experience. He accepted and rejected on the sole basis
of tradition's contribution to personal religious loyalty and devotion. The
best of the past and the present he confronted with the terrible test of actually
stimulating, feeding or giving outlet to the more sacred source-springs that
lie within.

Theology, formal and full statements of faith, belong to historical Christianity,
but not to its Founder. If Jesus had a theology, if he actually taught it,
it failed to register itself as a feature in the picture retained by those
who knew him best. The simple and single impression which he seems to have
left upon those whose witness is at the base of the first three Gospels is
that he was a passionately religious personality. Such theology as appears
in his religious thought is simply a dim reflection of the thought-forms in
which the religion of Israel, early and late, had found expression. These
features are characteristic of Jesus, but they were equally characteristic
of his contemporaries. They are not distinctive, and at this point Jesus makes
no contribution. But into these familiar thought-forms he poured a solid substance
and through them he breathed a new life that was his very own.

Jesus is greater than all the theological systems that have tried to compass
him about. He is more than Jewish Messianism, more than the resurrectionism
of Paul, more than the Logos of John, more than Greek soteriology, medieval
mysticism, the Roman regime, or Protestant
288
piety. All of these are only local interpretations of men and peoples who
have been his great and less great disciples. Jesus will bear the weight of
all the burdensome theologies that have attached themselves to his person,
but his religious significance is in no wise dependent upon any of them. Those
who feel that the acceptance of Christianity in its historical forms and statements
involves an intellectual sacrifice too great for a religious view of reason,
may approach Jesus in complete confidence. Jesus required no intellectual
sacrifices. He did not restrict or repress; he released the whole of life.
A lamp may not be put under a bushel, but on a stand.

The religious experience of Jesus defies systematization. Religion in his
experience is neither a maximum nor a minimum of beliefs. It is rather quantity
and quality of life actually lived. To advocate a special theological opinion
about Jesus, is to be untrue to all that he represented. He was not the advocate
of any opinions about himself. And the religion that names itself after him
must be more than definitions and statements about him. Jesus can not be defined
by a single doctrine or set of doctrines. No single statement or series of
statements will say all that he is f or all of his followers. We can not press
him into a single phrase, no matter how pithy and pregnant it may be. He can
not be cramped within the close confines of any creed-he is too great!

In its traditional emphasis historical Christianity has seemed to forget the
original sources of its theology. All of our Christian theology had its origin
in vital religious experience. It sprang from a fountain of fervent faith
that was in no sense cautious or self-conscious concerning the form in which
it expressed itself. Most of
289
our Christian theology comes from Paul, but Paul never thought that he would
become Christianity's first great theologian. It never occurred to him that
his formulations of his own personal faith would become normative for later
Christian thought. His statements of his faith were not framed in a, self-conscious
way. His only interest was in expressing the controlling elements of his experience
of Christ. His doctrines of the cross and resurrection were in no sense formal
for himself or for his original readers. They were -far removed from theological
theories, for both were cardinal centers of his personal Christian experience.
Paul felt that he had been crucified with Christ, that he had died with him,
and that he had seen the Risen Lord on the Damascus road. Both the cross and
the resurrection represented religious realities in his Christian life. They
were actual, not theoretical. The theology of Paul is the religion of Paul;
it was the organic issue of his faith in Christ. He shows no special interest
in the form of his faith, but his faith means everything to him. To separate
the theology of Paul from the religion of Paul is to do him injustice, for
his theology was part and parcel of his personal piety. Our New Testament
theology may sift out Paul's doctrines and end by missing the Apostle entirely.

Theology at its best possesses only a relative value. It is valuable only
to the degree in which it is able to communicate to us the original religious
convictions out of which it sprang. Much of our traditional theology has lost
its original freshness and vitality, for it has become an empty form devoid
of the solid substance that once gave it body. The great weakness in the transmission
of our theological tradition is that it fails to transmit the rich religious
experience in which it had its birth.
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Theoretically our theology conserves, but actually it fails to communicate.

The final crucible for all doctrine and dogma is religious experience, the
genuineness of the religious experience from which it came, and its ability
in turn to reproduce itself in subsequent Christian life. Our theology, inherited
from the distant past, is meaningless unless we press behind it to the very
pulse of the primitive Christian piety that once throbbed through it. And,
in many cases, the recovery and reproduction of the religious experience behind
our theology will result in an abandonment of the traditional terminology,
because vital religious experience seeks to express itself in its own way,
true to itself and its best genius. Faith, not the form, is the living thing.
And the task of the Christian to-day, even of the theologian, is not to cling
for dear life to an empty shell that is too frail to bear him up but to lay
hold of its original faith-content. Actual piety must be the criterion of
all theology, for theology is its off spring. In and of itself, theology is
barren ground. Individual personal experience is the only fertile soil in
which religion can live and thrive and do for human life what it claims. "Experience
is the only creative factor in the world's religions."

In the theological emphasis that still prevails in our modern Christianity
we need to be reminded that theology is valuable, and can be valuable, only
to the extent in which it is the expression of a surging religious life, because
of the religious verities and certainties it represents in actual experience.
Theologies are worthless unless we enjoy the corresponding experience in which
they had their
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birth. Further, we must remen-4)er that it is entirely possible to enjoy the
original experience and at the same time desert the traditional theological
terminology. One of the great tragedies in the history of Christianity has
been the insistence on form and the neglect of faith. Theology has often been
identified with religion, and this has resulted without exception in an impoverishment
of the religious life. The problem of the theologian who has any sense of
religious mission is not to create a more friendly atmosphere toward theology
on the part of the modern mind that by disposition is unsympathetic or even
hostile toward such. His real task is to take theology out of the remote realm
of meaningless abstractions, bring it down to the real world of religious
experience, and disclose to all the profound spiritual depths from which it
sprang, the primitive piety that stands behind and that courses through it.

Whether we like or not, the drift to-day is away from theology and in the
direction of a religious experience that is adequate for the living of actual
life. The time has for ever passed when enlightened Christianity can make
orthodoxy of theological opinion the touchstone of re
ligious loyalty. The modern religious mind has developed a disposition that
is wholly indifferent toward the intricacies of theological speculation. The
modern follower of Jesus feels that theology is too far removed from the pressing
problem of living life religiously. He feels that doctrine and dogma are cold
and formal, that the fire of faith is not in them. He feels that the formal
statements of faith are retained even though life has
departed from them. He feels that the affirmation or denial of most of our
theoretical theology is equally unim-
292
portant. In Jesus, as in most great religious geniuses, he finds no stimulus
to a systematic statement of his faith. In our Christian theology he finds
little that suggests Jesus himself. All that is left of him in official creeds
is intangible, vague and shadowy.

Theology may have a place in religion, but when it begins to suppress vital
religious experience or is offered as a substitute for such then the really
devout person will revolt in the name of religion itself. Religious faith,
as Professor Herrmann taught his students, is first of all a living thing."
Beliefs may codify themselves into confessions and creeds, but living faith
never. There is no real religious faith apart from a living subject who experiences
it as the commanding element of his conscious existence. All the religiously
valid theology can be stated in a single sentence: God is a living, loving
Father. All else is incidental and accessory.

Christianity, if it is to be what Jesus meant that the religion of his followers
should be, must transcend its theology, dogmatics and traditionalism. They
must be overcome as primitive Christianity overcame its inherited Judaism
and its apocalypticism. Theology can offer us a theory, but no actual hope
of religious salvation in the light of which we can live and work. Christianity's
victories have not been due to its theology except where such has been the
natural and spontaneous expression of a deep piety. Christianity's genius
has carried it along, the best of which has been its local loyalties to Jesus.
To its sporadic preservations of the spirit of Jesus, Christianity may ascribe
its religious but not all of its successes.
The essence of a religion is to be sought, not in its
293
formal and theoretical expressions, but in the richness of the religious experience
of those who are claimed and commanded by it. Creeds and confessions may force
the intellect to a rigid behavior in its speculations, but they do not necessarily
contribute to the religious living of the believer. A religion is no more,
no less, than what it means and accomplishes in the life of the person who
confesses and experiences it.

What is religion? Is it a precious heritage from the past that is to be preserved
changeless and intact? Or is religion the commanding element in the experience
of living men, the greatest of all forces in the molding and moving of human
life from one age to another-sometimes in one form, sometimes in another-but
always contributing to the excellence of all that men are, that they canandhopetobe?
In our odd moments we quarrel over doctrine and dogma. Sometimes it becomes
our chief Christian occupation. We pride ourselves on our liberalism or on
our fundamentalism, when in reality neither offers any religious hope. Thus
we push theology in all its forms into the very center of the religious consciousness,
and give it a place to which it has no native and natural right. Such is plain
disloyalty to Jesus.

Christianity may have its theology, but if it is no more it is certainly not
the religion of Jesus. If we conceive of Jesus in only theological and doctrinal
terms, we miss the greatest, grandest and best that he has to offer us. We
miss his religion; even more serious, we miss Jesus himself. Jesus is the
chief heritage of Christianity and when we come to see something more sacred
and secure in the traditions of our faith than we see in Jesus himself we
have come to a very dangerous pass. We have fallen into a really deplorable
situation when we begin to think
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more of our theology than we think of our religion, and especially when we
recognize the authority of tradition rather than the religious authority of
Jesus, whose every word should be our command. We dread doubt on theological
questions, but we are all skeptical of Jesus when it comes to the actual practise
of his personal piety and the reproduction of his religious experience.

We to-day rely on practically everything except the faith by which Jesus lived
and died. Our modern Christian attitude toward Jesus is about as follows:
We believe in him, but we do not trust him. We confess his name, but we are
not yet willing to commit ourselves loyally to his leadership. We retain the
most exalted beliefs about Jesus, but we manifest no real confidence in him
and his way of life. His own personal piety is not the principle on which
we order our existence. We take our theological theories very seriously, but
religiously we desert Jesus.

THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE OF JESUS AND ORGANIZED RELIGION

In recent times a great deal of debate has arisen about the question: Who
founded Christianity, Jesus or Paul? The answer to this question depends upon
one's understanding of Christianity. If by Christianity we mean Jesus' faith
in God as Father and in His kingdom and its coming, such as he preached in
the Sermon on the Mount and in his parables, then Jesus was the founder of
Christianity. But if by Christianity we mean an organized and official religion,
a new faith that involved a definite break with the religion of Israel, competing
with other religions of the first three centuries for supremacy in the Roman
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world, then Paul was the founder of Christianity. The founding of Christianity
in the historical forms in which it has appeared is the work of Paul and other
early Christians as the result of their Easter experiences.

That Paul and the early disciples foresaw the great institution that was to
come and that they consciously laid the foundation for it, is, of course,
out of question. Paul and the rest were passionate preachers of their great
religious convictions and certainties concerning Jesus. They were propagandists
of their faith, not plotters of a program that was to reach down through the
centuries. In Paul's day there was little or no official organization; the
Christian centers which he established were only mission stations, purely
democratic communities, one differing quite naturally from the other. But
at the heart of the Christian experience of Paul there were elements that
demanded a definite break with the judaistic past, elements that were actually
distinctive, and of this break Paul himself was clearly conscious. In fact,
Paul stands as the great first-century progressive who shook from the new
faith the shackles of Judaism and who launched it in the great currents of
the life of the Roman world. In its historical forms as a new faith, as a
system of thought, as an organized religion, Christianity bears the marks
of Paul rather than those of Jesus.
Jesus appears before us as a man with a profound experience of religion rather
than as the founder of a new religion. He manifests neither the elements nor
the efforts of the founders of the great world religions. The idea of founding
a new religion over against that of his people's past appears as a conception
wholly foreign to the mind of Jesus as revealed in the first three Gospels.
He never once gives the impression of inaugurating some-
296
thing wholly new. He often appears as a non-conformist in his conduct. He
breaks with certain religious conventionalities of his contemporaries; he
openly sets his ownn experience of religion over against particular precepts
of his people's past. But he never establishes between himself and the religious
past of his people an open breach. Not once does he proffer a substitute for
the ancient faith of Israel. He teaches no new and different God, but the
God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. He is the champion of the faith of Israel's
fathers. As we saw in chapter one, Jesus' own personal piety is inextricably
rooted in the best of the religion of his people.

Jesus was not conscious of founding a new faith that would later be transplanted
from its native to a foreign soil. The one commanding element of his experience
was the kingdom of God and its coming. His one great task was to announce
it. But even the kingdom he does not present as something new and strange
in the religious life of his people. On the contrary, he paints it in Jewish
colors. It is true that he preached the kingdom as universally human rather
than as a strictly Jewish value. But in this he was in perfect keeping with
his great prophetic predecessor, Second Isaiah (40-66), who first gave to
the religious mission of Israel a world outlook. For Jesus the kingdom was
God's great goal for his own and for all peoples. (Matt. 8,11.) In his faith
in the kingdom he was conscious that a greater thing than the temple or Solomon
or Jonah was here, but he never presented it as wholly other, as something
entirely foreign to Israel's religious experience in the past.

Every student of the life of Jesus knows that the distinctive elements in
his experience of religion were superJewish and universally human, that his
very appearance
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in Judaism meant the twilight of the old and the dawn of the new for those
who followed him. But in the historical form in which it appeared the religious
experience of Jesus was Jewish. He was consciously Jewish in his experience
of religion, and he remained such to the very end. Paul, however, was consciously
Christian in his experience of religion. There was the break with his Jewish
past, the annulment of the law, the Risen Lord of the Damascus road-all distinctive
elements of his Christian experience. The very form and content of Jesus'
religious experience force the historical student to take a Jewish view of
him. If one judges the personal religious faith of Jesus and the Christian
faith by their sources, objects and issues, he is forced to agree with Wellhausen
to the effect that "Jesus was not a Christian, but a Jew."

The traditional Christian idea is that Jesus, during his lifetime, looked
forward to and formally founded the church. But when we turn to the Gospel
accounts we find that this tradition rests upon an extremely weak literary
basis. The church as a word or plan of Jesus is found nowhere in the Gospels
of Mark and Luke. The word church is found only twice in the Gospels, both
times on the lips of Jesus and both in passages peculiar to Matthew. The first
passage comes in Matthew 16,17-19 in which Jesus is represented as celebrating
Simon's confession of his Messiahship by a festival founding of the church:
"Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah: for flesh and blood hath not revealed
it unto thee, but my Father who is in heaven. And I also say unto thee, that
thou
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art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of Hades
shall not prevail against it. I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom
of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven;
and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."

This passage is now commonly regarded as ingenuine and as a later Christian
addition. It has no parallel in Mark or Luke who report the confession scene
otherwise with as much interest and fulness as Matthew. The utterance itself
is too officious to come from Jesus. It is impossible in the thought of the
historical Jesus, for it contains the later Christian theory of the church.
It is impossible as a situation in his life, for it teaches explicitly the
primacy of Peter, a doctrine that can not have arisen before the closing decades
of the first century. Matthew reports the substance of this passage a second
time (18,18) where it is out of all connection with the Apostle Peter.

The second ecclesiastical passage comes in Matthew 18,15-17; "And if thy brother
sin against thee, go, show him his fault between thee and him alone: if he
hear thee, thou has gained thy brother. But if he hear thee not, take with
thee one or two more, that at the mouth of two witnesses or three every word
may be established. And if he refuse to hear them, tell it unto the church:
and if he refuse to hear the church also, let him be unto thee as the Gentile
and the publican."

This passage represents an earlier and less official type of
299
primitive Christianity than the first. The church is still a democratic community.
But this passage is plainly an extract from early Christian discipline and
does not go back to Jesus. His original word is to be found in Luke 17,3-4:
"Take heed to yourselves: if thy brother sin, rebuke him; and if he repent,
forgive him. And if he sin against thee seven times in the day, and seven
times turn again to thee saying, I repent; thou shalt forgive him."

The two passages just quoted belong to the history of early Christianity,
and both are late contributions of the churchman Matthew.16 The church as
the official organ of his faith and the future form of organization for his
following never figured in the religious outlook of the historical Jesus.
In fact, the idea of the church contradicts the whole of his religious outlook.
Jesus did not look to the future in terms of centuries, but he thought and
spoke of it in terms of weeks and months. In the future he saw only the kingdom
of God. The man who spoke Matthew 10,23; Mark 9,1; Luke 22,18 can not have
looked forward to an organized future for his following. When he sent out
the twelve, it was not as pastors but as hasting heralds of the kingdom. He
gave them no ecclesiastical or educational program. They are not to halt or
greet any man on the way, for there is no time for such. It is only in the
Fourth Gospel that Jesus becomes pastoral, planning and providing for
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his orphaned disciples after his death, promising an Advocate that will fill
the gap in their lives.

In Jesus we see none of the plans and preparations for the future such as
other great religious geniuses have left with their followers. He founded
no order as did Buddha, no school as did Plato, no sect as did John the Baptist.
Not a single word suggests that he planned an official and organized religion
to survive him. He has about him his personally chosen circle of companions,
but there is no hint to the effect that he attempted to organize them either
for the present or the future. The only suggestion of an organization among
the twelve is in the Fourth Gospel where Judas appears as the dishonest treasurer
of the group (12,6), whose duty it was to buy provisions or to give to the
poor (13,29). But even these details belong to the Fourth Evangelist's policy
of blackening the character of Judas.

Throughout his public life Jesus is utterly indifferent toward numbers in
his following; he seeks to avoid the great crowds. Such is certainly surprising
on the part of any one who is laying plans for the survival of his work and
following after his death. Why he chose just twelve personal companions we
do not know. On the basis of a word like Matthew 19,28 we might think that
the number twelve was a matter of Jewish tradition with Jesus. However, he
was not the man to include an unworthy disciple or to exclude a worthy disciple
for the sake of a sacred number. If the number twelve was a part of any plan
that he had in mind, it was shattered by the desertion of Judas.
Within the following of the Baptist there were ele-
301
ments of nascent organization, religious practises which he seems to have
given his disciples that held them together as a group and that distinguished
them from other religious sects of the day. The one practise which seems to
have distinguished them and to have given their master his popular name, the
Baptist, was the religious rite of baptism. A second bond that held the followers
of the Baptist together was the custom of periodic fasting which they had
in common with other Jewish sects and which brought them into conflict with
Jesus and his disciples. (Mark 2,18.) A third bond that seems to have come
from the Baptist himself was that of prayer. The Baptist seems not only to
have taught his disciples prayer as a religious practise, but he seems to
have given them a special prayer. (Luke 5,33; 11,1.) A fourth bond of organization
came from the Baptist-a common religious confession which he seems to have
heard from those who presented themselves to him for baptism. (Matt. 3,6;
Mark 1,5.) Of its exact nature we can say little except that it was a confession
of sins, but it seems to have been informal rather than formal, a voluntary
response to his message of repentance rather than compulsory.

The following of the Baptist disappeared from history; that of Jesus conquered
the Roman world. From Acts 18,24-19,7 we might conclude that at least portions,
if not all, of the Baptist's following were absorbed in the Christian movement.
But it is interesting to note that John the Baptist had a following of sufficiently
strong constitution to survive its master's death, to preserve itself independently
for considerable time thereafter, and to carry on its own missionary program
far from the scene of its master's work.
Among the disciples of Jesus during his lifetime all
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such elements of nascent religious organization are missing. The first personal
appearance of Jesus in the Gospel story is at the Jordan where he is baptized
by John. Jesus, as we said, regarded John's baptism as a sacred religious
rite and he participated in it actuated by the deepest and most genuine religious
motives. Yet he did not take over from John this religious rite. He and his
disciples observed no custom of periodic fasting. Jesus prayed as none before
or after him, and he taught his disciples extensively on the practise and
principles of prayer. But we never see him observing specially set hours of
worship; he does not withdraw for calendared seasons of prayer. The praying
of Jesus and his group is instinctive rather than institutional. For his followers
he has no formal creeds or confessions, no articles for the declaration of
faith, no ceremonies or cults. Even on the last night of his life he is not
founding a religious institution to be repeated in his personal memory as
the primitive Christian community at an early date began to construe it. (I
Cor. 11,23-25; Luke 22,19-20.) In Matthew 26,26-29 and Mark 14,22-25 Jesus
makes no reference to a repetition of the occasion in the future, except as
he will one day drink it anew with them in the kingdom of God. The original
incident seems to be that Jesus is celebrating the Jewish passover with his
disciples and that the cup and bread are simply a final personal pledge of
his faith that the kingdom of God will come. (Luke 22, 15-18.)

Jesus appears in the New Testament as utterly indifferent toward organization.
In fact, he manifests no genius for effecting it. From the standpoint of organization,
no great religious genius ever left his following so poorly prepared to meet
the future as did Jesus. He seems to have trusted to purely personal bonds
to hold his disciples
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to himself, and during his lifetime it was this more intimate type of bond
that held his disciples together. This personal loyalty and attachment did
not stand all the stress and strain of circumstances. The twelve deserted
him at the scene of his arrest; Peter denied him, and Judas betrayed him into
the hands of his enemies. But after his death it was the conviction that Jesus
was alive again, that they, the Apostles as well as others, had seen him,
that he was with them "even unto the end of the world," that welded his former
companions into a compact company which later resulted in the Christian church.

With his unconventional religious character and conduct it would be difficult
to fit Jesus into any ecclesiastical system. judging from his attitude toward
the official and organized religion of his day, Jesus would be a poor churchman.
He made no wholesale revolt against the religious institutions of his day
and people. The Galilean synagogues were a frequent scene of his teaching.
His attitude toward the synagogue is an excellent example of his religious
conservatism, but he never connects the synagogue with the religious hope
of the future. Jesus was
never more conservative than when he went as a pious pilgrim to Jerusalem
to celebrate the most sacred of Jewish festivals. But even into the celebration
of the Passover he pours his own personal faith concerning the coming of the
kingdom. Jesus was always giving himself to the more personal and informal
aspects of religion.

The impersonal and formal he neglected. His experience of religion was purely
individual, apparently quite capable of dispensing with the institutional.
In his message Jesus stripped off all appearances, outer casings and superficialities.
He ignored prominent elements in the conventional foreground, and out of the
dim
304
theoretical background he would bring up some neglected or conventionalized
issue as a commanding element of religious experience. A religion of cult
and ceremony he rejected once for all in true prophetic fashion, and he confronted
his contemporaries with obedience to the divine will as the essence of true
piety. He opposed the elaborate in favor of the elemental, the official in
favor of the original. To religious experience he applied no external tests,
but those searching tests of simple and sincere living.

Jesus bound man's hope of religious salvation to no institution, no matter
how sacred or of how long standing. He left religion where the very structure
and substance of the human constitution demand that it should be left, an
intimate matter between man and his Maker. Religious loyalty he attached to
no religious institution, to no body of beliefs, but to God himself. He did
not regard faith as a deposit from the past that is to be defended against
all comers. He knew of no such impersonal loyalty. In the experience of Jesus
faith must function; it must have its fruitage in character and conduct. He
did not judge religious living as a calculating and balancing of religious
acts, as a sum of good-works that offsets shortcomings and sins. For Jesus
religion in human experience is the fundamental direction intent upon God
and His kingdom.

That Jesus surveyed all the coming centuries and foresaw the necessity of
an organization and institution such as the Christian church is nowhere clear
in our best sources. He looked forward to something far less remote, to a
permanent society of God and man accomplished by a harmony of the human will
with the divine. "Thy kingdom come!" is the greatest prayer, purpose and
305
program of the church. The fact that Jesus did not found a religious organization
or an official faith should drive the church, which claims him as the center
of its life, to the most searching and conscientious introspection. The church
must never forget that the religious experience of Jesus is that of the layman
and that Jesus singled out the original rather than the official elements
of religion. It must keep in mind that in its official form an organized religion
may travel far from its original sources of purity and power, that it may
even come to the place where its original life-deposit is neglected, forgotten
or even supplanted. It should remember that its officialism and orthodoxy
are acquired and that they were not a part of the original acumen. Officialism
and orthodoxy may never look to Jesus for a spiritual ally. He fixed no forms
of faith; he framed no standards by which theoretical opinions are to be measured.
He left man in his experience of God as unhampered and free as man is in any
field of
his experience. He sought to set men spontaneously and seriously in the quest
of God, His kingdom and will, and he cast no care in the direction of what
or how they should believe in a formal way.

Religion as the human quest of God is not the sole possession of those who
are herded and housed in a cliquish conventionality and who pride themselves
on preserving the faith iota for iota. In view of the plain New Testament
facts themselves the official and the orthodox, those unquestioning savers
of what has been, is not now, and never again will be, should be the most
modest and humble in the presence of Jesus. They should read again some of
his plain paradoxes about the first being last and the last being first, about
the greatness of the least and the leastness of the great.
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The religious experience of Jesus stands above and beyond all organization
and officialism. His spirit can not be confined to such; it breaks all the
bands of institutionalism. A subscribing to statement can never be a substitute
for a sensing and sharing of this spirit. In our modern church life we are
too self-conscious. Not for a moment are we allowed to forget ourselves and
our theo. retical opinions. We are so sensitive to our differences that we
seldom feel the throb of that flow of spiritual life that should make us one.
The secret of successful relig6 ious living, according to Jesus, is the complete
forgetting of self, utter abandonment to the great goals of God for men. What
we should seek is not conformity but unity in the midst of greatest natural
variety. We must abandon the idea that the church is primarily a conserving
agency. Religion, according to Jesus, is a constructive and commanding force
in human life and living. As long as the church conceives of its chief task
as that of preserving its heritage pure, just so long is it dispensable as
an organ in our human society.

The church, if we judge it in the light of what Jesus sought to accomplish,
is first of all an agency for the spiritual recovery and restoration of men
as individuals and as groups. When the church calms its conscience with the
complimentary thought that it is the kingdom of God on earth, it is dangerously
near apostasy and betrays the morbidness of its morale. In the light of the
New Testament itself it is inconceivable that Jesus could have regarded any
organization or institution as the visible kingdom of God. In his f aitb the
kingdom is of and from God; men may meet its conditions, but they do not make
it. The church may feel that it is the representative of Jesus on earth, but
it should remember that while it pos-
307
sesses this consciousness of high call and holy commission it is not the direct
issue and product of his own planning. Rather should it take up Jesus' own
work-that of preparing men for the society of God.

The church should always be humble in its claims, proving its worth and the
justice of its claims in the terms of a maximum of ministry. If the church
could once become true to the best of its genius, it would not be in need
of making claims for itself and its right to recognition, for such would be
unquestioned. It could become like a great unpretentious personality, the
thoroughness of whose consecration, the simplicity of whose spirit, the certainty
of whose convictions, would come as a providential blessing to all men who
seek for light and strength to live by.
All great religions have had their source in some passionately religious personality.
But it seems to be inevitable that a religion which starts with an intense
personality, when it begins to win its way with the masses and finds itself
thrown into the sweeping currents of the world's life, should develop into
an organized movement that has its official institution with corresponding
rituals, liturgies, ceremonies, doctrines, dogmas, confessions and creeds.
The purer prophetic religion of Israel became encased in the impregnable armor
of the priestly cult of Judaism.

Christianity chose Jesus rather than his cause. Whether this would have been
a personal disappointment to Jesus we shall never know. But the fact remains
that the great cause of God, which he served and for which he died, was almost
if not wholly neglected by his confessed followers. The fervent faith that
possessed the simpler soul of Jesus was soon crystallized into fixed formulas
with different sources, objects and issues. How the Christian church, even
when fully conscious of all the good that
308
it has done and of all the human help that it has rendered, can continue to
read the Gospel story without a pang of conscience, without a sting of regret
and remorse, is a modern psychological miracle. It seems that it might be
possible for a religion that is represented by an institution to retain at
least a fair measure of the warm spirit from which it sprang and to prevent
itself from degenerating into a religion of rigid respectability and cold
convention. In the midst of all the impediments that the centuries have loaded
upon it, it would be a saving song of human hope if the church could retain
a full share of inner independence and freedom such as characterized Jesus.

The great danger that threatens the church is not heresy, but apostasyv-a
virtual denial and desertion of the faith and spirit of Jesus. Diversity of
opinion is not half so dangerous as selfishness, staleness and sourness of
spirit. A church that is constantly on its guard can never give itself to
and for men as Jesus gave himself. Our modern religious work is half make-believe.
We go through the motions, and we delude ourselves into thinking that we are
religious. We trust to organization as though religion were merely a matter
of mechanics. We meet in conventions and conferences, and we go home with
some new complex. We appoint committees and sub-committees. We make surveys
and compile statistics. We inaugurate programs with pious ords. We do all
this with a sense of slogans and catchsatisfaction: Surely we have prospered
the work of the Lord. We go ahead in our mechanics-madness as though the eternal
order itself were composed of an almighty chairman who follows Robert's rules
of order, as though the next world were a spacious accounting-house full of
adding-machines,
309
card catalogues and filing systems (for we are modern in our conception of
the next world), a great bookkeeping establishment with countless clerks,
an immense information bureau with hosts of angelic apprehenders of our human
misdemeanors, as though God were One who listened only to the findings of
the recording angel and in the light of the conclusions drawn, started a fresh
drive of propaganda among the sons of men.
The religious values represented by the church to-day are theoretical rather
than actual. It requires personal devotion to impersonal things. It forgets
that such is exactly counter to the human constitution. Men feel that they
must center their loyalties on things that mean most to them.

Only concrete meanings can command human devotions. When the church degenerates
into a school of theology, becomes a mere drill master in doctrine and dogma,
congratulates itself on its conferences and conventions-then we may say that
the deepest things of religion have departed from it. The church may keep
its traditional theories on this or that religious theme, but it must not
insist that such is the true essence of a religion that names itself after
Jesus. The creeds of the church are products of conflict; its doctrines were
framed against foes. They are not the natural and spontaneous expression of
the Christian faith in its intimate and personal phases.

For many a liberal-minded modern man of strongly religious inclination theology
possesses not more than historical interest. Doctrine and dogma are dead driftwood;
officialism and orthodoxy are offensive obstacles; creeds and confessions
are crumbling crusts. But still the Master of men, who taught more than these
things, stands and calls for him, and he in turn, like the four fishermen
and
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the tax-gatherer, is ready to leave all and follow him. Jesus has lost none
of his power over humankind, but men must have a chance to see and know him
as he was. One of the chief obstacles in the way of a resolute return to Jesus
is an organized Christianity that has ceased to interpret itself and its task
in the light of loyalty to all that he was and represented in the way of religion.
The pulpit is not presenting Jesus as he was, for the pulpiteer knows little
about Jesus, the fulness and sufficiency of his experience of God. The chief
task of too many ministers to-day seems to be to assure us that we are good
and religious, when we in our better moments know that such is not the case.

From Christian circles we often hear the complaint about the lack of real
religious interest on the part of the modern man. But the modern man could
just as well complain of the lack of an earnest and effective enthusiasm within
confessed Christian circles. He finds little to attract him, still less to
command him. Seldom does he hear from the church a message, seldom does he
witness from it a show of spirit, that might create within him a permanent
purpose to become a better man as an individual and as a member of his group.

The church's great task is to follow Jesus, not to recruit followers of itself.
Once the church begins to accomplish this task in any appreciable measure
it need never again be concerned about its constituency. There will be no
clanish church but a great spiritual society following Jesus toward the great
goal for which he lived and worked and died-the kingdom of God in which the
divine will is as seriously sought and as perfectly performed on earth as
it is in heaven. This may be a radical religious idealism, but it is the clear
call of that one great re-
311
ligious figure of history who can command the loyalty and life of modern man,
the confident and consecrated figure of the prophet-preacher of Nazareth.

The church may never be able to realize this radical religious ideal set by
Jesus. Its success ' will not be absolute but relative, for the higher the
ideal the stronger and more serious are the obstacles of human frailty in
the way of its realization. But Jesus was willing to accept followers in spite
of all their weaknesses. On the basis of constitutional weakness he excluded
none from the quest of the kingdom of God. The church needs to learn to be
satisfied with beginnings. Jesus seems to have sought not more than a vital
start, a single seed with the germ of life in it. The later stages he trusted
to the Divine; for growth and harvest he could wait. One of the plainest lessons
of Jesus for his followers is working, watching and waiting.

The very distance of the goal set by Jesus is awful, but this does not justify
a resistless resignation or retreat. It calls rather for a resolute return
of the church to the genius that gave it birth. The Founder of the past may
not have foreseen all the facts of the present, but the nature of the problem
is unchanged. Progress is a matter of spirit rather than of system. As a system
Christianity has been about as successful as it could hope to be, but as a
spiritual movement its work is not yet well under way. If it will trust to
its original genius, it can work wonders in our human order. The sources of
strength are there if we dare trust them in the most serious matter of our
human experience.

What after all is a religious society? One that is capable not only of surviving
but that is able to cope success-
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fully with all odds? It would be difficult to find a finer example of such
a religious society than that which speaks directly to us through the New
Testament. The earliest Christian community was little more than a Jewish
Christcult, a Messianic movement within the confines of Judaism. In the early
chapters of Acts the message of the Apostles moves along the line that the
little band with its faith is nothing other than true Judaism, the promise
to Israel gone into fulfillment. Even Paul in his more Jewish moments, when
his disappointed love for his people comes to the surface, shares strongly
of this feeling. It was only in the presence of persecution and adversity
that the early Christians realized that they represented a new and different
religion.

The New Testament comes fresh and strong from the nascent period of Christianity's
history. Consequently its literary expressions manifest that natural variety
and diversity that belong to the early stages of any movement. Within the
New Testament itself Christianity bears a dozen different complexions. A position
that one writer sets forth as fundamental and indispensable another writer
will neglect entirely. There is no orthodoxy or officialism, only the first
faint hints of such appear in the latest and religiously least significant
of the New Testament books. It would be difficult to find a more heterodox
collection of Christian writings than the New Testament presents. Each of
its writers who shows any measure of religious genius expresses his faith
in his own free way. They write under no external restraint. There are no
fixed formulas to which they must rigidly adhere in giving expression to the
personal faith and feeling back of their pens.

Yet straight through the New Testament there runs a
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vital bond of unity, and its writers are essentially one in their faith. It
is not an orthodoxy of opinion, nor is it a singleness of statement. The New
Testament writers tire one in their religious experience. With all of their
diversity they arc united on the religious significance of Jesus. The religious
society back of the New Testament is a community of conviction. Its writers
are bound together by common longings and fears, persecutions and adversities,
expectations and enthusiasms, consolations and confidences, loves and loyalties,
convictions and certainties. They are one, not in form, but in fervor and
fidelity of faith.

Only such a religious society possesses the power necessary to accomplish
its task in the world. The church must learn again from the New Testament.
Its vitality and life are quite apart from external matters. It must be a
community of conviction. Religion strikes down to the source-springs, and
the church must become a spiritual society of those who live by common fears
and hopes, common loves and loyalties. The only valid religious faith is that
which can still fear, impart courage, realize hope and nourish love and devotion.

Jesus spoke of the religious life in terms of loyalties and devotions. At
the center of human devotions, as the pole of human loyalties, he set God
and His kingdom. These his followers are to sense, seek, secure and share;
by them they are to be claimed and commanded; to them they are to be wholly
committed and consecrated. In the religious following of Jesus there is no
place for those traditional divisive forces and factors that have shattered
the church's unity. Only a resolute recognition of the cardinal centers of
the personal faith of Jesus can bring all right-thinking and right-spirited
Christian
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people together. The religious experience of Jesus is essentially unifying.

JESUS-THE AUTHOR AND PERFECTER OF OUR FAITH

Who was Jesus? What is the truth about Jesus Christ? The answers have been
legion. Within the New Testament we read that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son
of God, the Risen Lord, the Word become flesh, the Lamb of God, and the Savior
of the world. And Jesus was all these things for the New Testament Christians.
In the history of the church these primitive answers were retained, but they
lost their original simplicity and power. They became parts of elaborate systems
of thought in which supernaturalism gave its metaphysical replies; orthodoxy
had its opinions; theology had its theories, and faith its fixed formulas.
During the nineteenth century, the century rich in its lives of Jesus, historical
criticism gave its answers: Jesus was a teacher and a healer, a moralist,
a mystic, a reformer, a fanatic, a prophet, a preacher, a religious genius.
The answers to the question, Who was Jesus? have always been interesting,
and so far as they have come from genuine religious experience they have been
and still are inspiring.

But the historical student of the life of Jesus to-day has his own answer
to this question. His answer does not come in the terms of Christian tradition,
nor in the language of abstract speculation, nor in the pious phrases of the
past. It is framed in the light of a careful and conscientious study of the
New Testament with a view to the truth and the facts. It does not come on
the basis of a single passage, but on the basis of all that the best New Testament
sources seem to present and por-
315
tray. His answer comes in the light of literary records, of the conclusions
of a conscientious appraisal of these, of historical probability, and most
important of all in the light of the psychology of a living personality the
whole of whose being was exclusively religious. For the historical student,
Jesus was a religious subject, an experient of religion, in possession of
the richest religious experience of our human history.

The historical student feels that the traditional thinking of the church has
never done Jesus historical and personal justice. He feels that the person
of Jesus is not a problem in abstract metaphysics or in speculative theology.
For him metaphysics and theology possess no key that would disclose to us
the real significance of his appearance in human history. At best they can
furnish only semi-mythological and imaginary interpretations. The historical
student sees in Jesus a problem in history, for he actually lived in the first
century; in humanity, for he was a serious sharer of our human experience;
in religion, for he was an exclusively religious personality. It is only as
we approach him as a problem in personal piety that we are true to the state
and nature of the facts, and that we come near a satisfactory and helpful
conclusion. Jesus then becomes "the author and perfecter of our faith." (Heb.
12,2.)

With religious right the Christian consciousness may state, even formulate,
its faith in Jesus. But it must be sure that these statements and formulations
express his real religious significance, that they demonstrate clearly the
actual contribution which he has to make to our human experience. Further,
it must avoid that ancient and religiously atrophying error of identifying
faith with its formulations.
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We may never under any circumstances surrender the person of Jesus. To strip
Christianity of the person of Jesus would leave it utterly poverty-stricken
and lifeless. It is in Jesus alone as a human, historical and religious figure
that Christianity can lay claim to distinction in the field of religion. All
of our religious faith must center exclusively upon what he, by being what
he was, offers us. But we must remember that Jesus, not later opinions and
theories about him, is the one sure and substantial thing that we possess.
All else is accessory and incidental, not essential and permanent. To center
all emphasis and interest upon theoretical conceptions of his person is to
miss entirely his real significance. We must conceive of him in terms of his
contribution to our common human problem of living life religiously. Jesus
represents fundamental religious values that are absolutely indispensable
to humankind if it is to extract anything permanent from its existence. We
must, therefore, make a religious appraisal of Jesus. Any interpretation that
neglects his religious experience misses the finest and best that he has to
off er and to communicate.

Jesus' contribution to the religion of the race is purely personal. To our
human history he gives a human life religiously lived, a human experience
religiously exalted, enriched and enhanced. He does not stand as an indefinite
and intangible ideal, as an absurd abstraction of pious f ancy. He stands
rather on the solid ground of history, our great human contemporary, a real
man who dared live life exclusively in the presence of God and in behalf of
men. Many ingenious inquiries have been made that would disclose the secret
sources of his life, the pure perfection of his personality, but all have
been, doubtless all to come will be, unsatisfactory. We shall
317
never be able to explain Jesus for the simple reason that the ultimate sources
of personality are beyond us, still more so in the case of him who stands
as the one gigantic figure on our spiritual horizon. But if we seek the chief
contributing cause that made him what he was, we shall have to locate it in
the purity and perfection of his religious experience which, functioning as
the chief factor and force in his life, had, as its necessary corollary a
corresponding purity of personality.

Religion as a vital power in individual life is beyond our explanation. It
is essentially irrational for those who would discover its origin, operation
and manifestations in a life that is religiously lived. In the case of Jesus,
there is no need of explanation so long as we may enrich the whole of our
life and experience from his own.

The life of Jesus, as we have said already, is the richest and most stimulating
body of religious subject-matter -that we possess. His personal piety, the
nature and substance of his religious experience, is the greatest and most
convincing thing about him. In the history of humanity's religious experience
Jesus stands supreme, superb and sublime. His faith in God and His kingdom
with all that it involves is the most significant contribution which he has
to make. He is the founder of the only adequate religious faith. In him, human
life is exposed to all that is highest and best in the human conception and
experience of religion. In Jesus, faith and fact meet, merge and live. In
him we see, and he calls on us to share, all that God and religion at their
best may and can mean in human life and experience. The faithful follower
of Jesus, then, may look to him, as did the writer of Hebrews, as "the author
and perfecter of our faith." (12,2.) Here we have a purely religious ap-
318
proach such as the very substance of the first three Gospels forces us to
make. For me personally, this crisp and concise confession in Hebrews is the
finest of all statements in the history of Christianity concerning who Jesus
was and what he is to mean for his followers.

Those who choose to see in Jesus more than the author and perfecter of our
faith have a right to do so. Each has a right, according to the measure of
his religious life, to enrich his experience from that of Jesus in every way
that he can. But Jesus must mean this to every faithful follower, if he is
to mean anything at all. The plus which Christian piety may add and has added
must be more than impersonal and theoretical abstractions; they must represent
religious realities that were present in the religious experience of Jesus
himself. Any conception of Jesus is worthy of him that comes from the mind
and heart of one who is definitely committed to a determined and devoted discipleship.
Wherever he stands as the religious center and authority in individual and
group life there is no danger of a too low conception of his person. As Jesus
once told one of his intolerant disciples (Mark 9,39), "There is no man who
shall do a mighty work in my name, and be able quickly to speak evil of me."

When all the theoretical attempts f ail adequately to comprehend Jesus, then
the historical student reserves for himself the religious right to form a
new resolve and return to the New Testament, there to win, for himself at
least, all that Jesus offers of permanent value and worth for human life and
living. The historical student who is compelled to take a religious view of
Jesus is in
319
no way disloyal to the essential elements of the Christian faith, that is,
if we understand Christianity as devoted discipleship such as he demanded
of his followers. Jesus stands at the very center of the religious faith of
the historical student, not as a religious object, but as a religious subject
whose experience of God is sufficiently rich to demand limitless loyalty.
In our modern day when we insist that religion must be real, that faith should
function, there is not a finer or more resourceful conception of Jesus and
the place he should occupy in the Christian faith than that of Hebrews 12,2.

Wherein lies the authority of Jesus? Certainly not in theology, for he did
not teach it. Certainly not in doctrine and dogma, for he preached neither.
Certainly not in confession and creed, for he never required such. Certainly
not in officialism and orthodoxy, for he founded neither. Certainly not in
religious convention, for he broke with it. Jesus is an authority in just
one field, that of personal religious experience. He stands in history as
the supreme authority on the subject of living human life religiously. And
it is just at this point that the social significance of Jesus' religious
experience appears, for there is no social religion apart from individually
religious personalities. At the very center of our human order Jesus sets
a plain yet profound piety that is a source of light and strength sufficient
for coping with all the major and minor matters of individual and group life-that
is, for those who dare to seek to share it. As the perfecter of the purest
personal piety the authority of Jesus will remain until another of the sons
of men shall choose God so completely.

Jesus, however, is not
an authority on the forms of
320
religious experience. He never lectures his disciples on either its varieties
or uniformities. He gave them no set standards and criterions for judging
the forms of religious experience. It was not a problem with which he was
forced to deal as was Paul in I Corinthians 12-14. Religious certainty and
the genuineness of personal religion he did not base upon its psychological
forms of expression. He never prescribed types even for those to whom he devoted
most care and attention. How and what they should feel he did not say. To
all religious experience Jesus applied but one test, that of fruits. In order
to be genuine religious experience must express itself in corresponding character
and conduct. He laid no emphasis on the form of religious experience, but
on its content.

If we approach the personal piety of Jesus from the standpoint of religious
profession, we are amazed at its simplicity and modesty. He who possessed
the most exalted consciousness of God's high call and holy commission, who
was held by an unparalleled confidence and conviction, makes no profuse profession
that springs from experiences past or present. Rather he discourages religious
profession and presses on with all his soul in the persistent pursuit of the
divine will for himself and all who are like-minded. As psychological types
we know next to nothing of his religious experiences. If he had such, he never
refers to them; still less does he set them as normative for others. Nowhere
in the words of Jesus do the stock phrases of religious witness appear.

Interest in and emphasis upon the form rather than the content of religious
experience is characteristic of the history of religion among all peoples.
The various Christian sects that have appeared and have insisted on
321
special types of religious experience as the sole sources of religious certainty
have not been followers of Jesus in this respect. Conformities in religious
experience seem to have had their origin in the ecstatic and strongly psychic
beginnings of Christianity such as appear in the early chapters of Acts and
in I Corinthians 12-14. But Jesus stipulated no set type of religious experience
that should become universal among his disciples and as such give the distinctive
features to their faith.

Some scholars, notably Albert Schweitzer" and Karl Weidel,"' have undertaken
to estimate the contribution and authority of Jesus in terms of moral will
directed toward the highest religious values. They speak of him as the man
of will (den Willensmensch, Weidel), possessing and in turn imparting a strange
and stimulating strength of will (Schweitzer).

Such an appraisal of the authority of Jesus has under it two solid foundation
stones. In the first place, it is true to the psychology of religious experience.
The moral will is the seat of all personal religion that moves on a high plane;
it is an integral element in the f abric of personal religious faith. Professor
Hocking writes, "A faith without a large ingredient of will, is not faith
at all."'O Professor Coe writes, "The center of gravity in religion is the
moral will." In the second place, the estimate of Jesus in terms of the
moral will has under it the solid foundation of the Gospel picture. Any one
who has observed so much as the character and content of Jesus' choices can
not but be astonished at that won-
322
drous,wealth of will which he was capable of launching in the quest of the
Divine. Jesus faced decisions and he made them in the most resolute manner.
His work demanded deepest determination in the face of disappointment, and
he was capable of it. His choice of the divine cause required constancy, unfailing
confidence, unflinching fidelity. It required a will, a wealth of will, to
believe what Jesus believed. The whole of his experience is an unprecedented
exhibition of a vast volume of volition in the service of religion. Further,
his religious demands upon his followers were direct appeals to the moral
will. No religious leader has ever laid such pressing practical demands on
the individual and social will as did Jesus. The discipleship of Jesus requires
a real will-to-believe.

There is a strangely stimulating strength of will in the mind of Jesus, but
to make him an authority in matters of the moral will only is a much too narrow
confinement for the power that he possessed. His passionate personality bursts
the narrow walls of will. They may define him on the one side, but they can
not contain him. Pure will is definite, sharp and exacting. But Jesus possessed
an enthusiastic energy. Pure personal piety is will, but it is more, even
though will is its most substantial single element. "Not in the cold, deliberate
choice of will, but in the passion of soul is to be found that flood of energy
which can open to us the sources of powermastered by such a passion the soul
will admit no def eat."

The thing that characterizes Jesus from the volitional point of view is the
depth of his personal devotion.
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Devotion is more than decision and determination. Decision may be clear-cut,
extremely self-exacting. Determination may be undivided, even desperate. But
in devotion there is a warmth, a glow, a burst, a fervor that make self-denying
decision and determination possible. Devotion as it appears in the religious
experience of Jesus means the enlistment of the whole sclf-will, emotion,
thought, faith-in the service of something beyond and above self. The will
is never at its best unless the subject possesses a sense of being claimed
and commanded. Mere selection is far removed from service and sacrifice. Choice
is only a mechanical mental process when compared with that entire commitment
and consecration of which the religious subject is capable. The will may do
police duty, but it takes passion to promote. The power that pushes a personality
toward its goal demands will, but it demands more. It operates less under
the consciousness of having chosen, more in the conviction of having been
chosen. Above selection in the experience of Jesus stand service and sacrifice;
above decision and determination, a depth of devotion that demands all; above
choice, a consciousness of call and commission, utter commitment and consecration.

With all of his wealth of will, the attitude of Jesus is never that of self-sufficiency.
As we saw in chapter three, Jesus on this as on all points remains rigidly
religious. He is fully aware of the weakness of the human will. Therefore,
he taught the graciousness of God over against the merit of man. And there
is no good reason why we should not regard this fundamental religious position
as autobiographical, an extract from the depths of his own experience.
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In our modern approach to Jesus we must leave him where and how and what he
was, as real as he was-human, historical, religious. We must leave him where
he found God and God found him, a religious figure of our human history. Above
all, we may not separate him from the religious centers of his life without
inflicting grave injustice on him and on ourselves. The religious evaluation
of Jesus is the only one that will bring us to him and him to us, the only
avenue that will communicate what he has to impart. In all of his life and
work Jesus placed himself on the side of humanity. Speculation only separates
him from us and makes him increasingly unreal.

There are very definite religious dangers in deification-dangers destructive
of Christianity and the chief cause of the church itself. Absolute deification
withdraws Jesus and his religious experience from the ranks of men who most
need religion. As long as he remains with them, one of them, men may feel
that he has something to say to them, still more to impart. They may be reasonably
assured that what he became they may at least attempt with courage and in
some measure attain. The great majority of modern men who feel that religion
is practical and who are convinced that religious living is -. hard task claiming
their all, will never consent to the removal of Jesus from their ranks, for
their only hope is the conviction and certainty that he is on their side.
We may take Jesus from the ranks of men of true and deep religiousness and
ascribe to him all possible predicates, but the sense of being led and the
courage to follow has departed from men and leaves religiously stranded those
who are most in need of religious leadership and command. A religion about
Jesus may fit the pious
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patterns of the past and satisfy the ecclesiastic and doctrinaire of the present,
but only the religion of Jesus can recommend and prove itself in the life
and experience of modern men who find themselves confronted at every turn
with grave moral struggles that threaten to destroy them and their kind. We
may admire and adore Jesus, deify and worship him, as our inclinations and
inspirations prompt us individually, but we must follow him, believe with
him, and seek to share his experience if he is to mean most to us religiously.

The disposition to deify Jesus was natural enough for the first Christians.
The very nature and substance of their Easter' experiences virtually demanded
this. But for us to-day such deification will only keep him remote, out of
all contact with the problems of our experience. The whole structure of Paul's
Christian faith rested upon the validity of his Damascus vision of the Risen
Lord (I Cor. 15,14), "If Christ hath not been raised, then is our preaching
vain, and your faith also is vain."

But the resurrection faith will never claim us as it claimed Paul and its
original experients. We may entertain it as a common human hope, we may maintain
it for Jesus in particular, but theoretical belief in the resurrection willnever
solve for us the common human problem of living life religiously in the sense
of Jesus.

Our loyalty to Jesus is not a matter of theoretical and impersonal belief.
It is a matter of trust, of warm personal confidence in his ability to help.
We must approach Jesus to-day as he was approached by those of his contemporaries
for whom he did most-with the hope of
326
high helpfulness from him. The leper came to him with a confidence that almost
staggers us (Mark 1,40), "Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean." The
centurion met him with a faith that was new in Israel (Matt. 8,8), "Only say
the word, and my servant shall be healed."
The woman's reflections are a tremendous tribute (Mark 5,28), "If I touch
but his garments, I shall be made whole."

Jesus and his contemporaries were not separated by theological theories. Their
relation to him and his relation to them was purely personal. They knew him
as a real man of their own life and experience, a knowledge unhampered by
traditions. And even to-day we have a native and natural religious right to
approach him as he was approached by his contemporaries and as he approached
them, so far as careful study can clear the way for us. In our approach to
Jesus we have a right to strip our minds of everything that has intervened
since his death, so far as this is possible.

To base the religious authority of Jesus on the Immacu. late Conception, the
Virgin Birth, the historicity of the nature-miracles, or even on the resurrection,
is distorted devotion to primitive Christian values. His religious significance
does not stand or fall with any of these things. We must determine the authority
of Jesus by those elements in his experience that are vital and life-giving,
327
those elements that are capable of enriching our human experience in such
a way that we become capable of coping successfully with all the exigencies
of our existence.

The modern question concerning Jesus is not whether we may or may not speak
of him in the terms of deity and divinity. The great question is: How valid
is Jesus' religious experience? May we trust his experience of God as true?
Is his faith real and reliable? May we live in the faith that the world is
good because it is God's, that God is a living and loving Father, that all
men of all conditions are His children, that He has a kingdom that will come?-
Is Jesus' personal piety worthy of reproduction? Is his religion something
that we may share? Is it something that we may live by? It is at these points
that the religious authority of Jesus is at stake, and only seasoned experience
in his devoted discipleship can answer these questions. The historical student
is ready to answer these questions in the affirmative. He believes that the
religious experience of Jesus will stand until all human experience proves
itself to be only a delusion.

The question, Who was Jesus? each must answer for himself with the New Testament
before him and in the presence of God. Here our learned text-books in systematic
theology will not help us. In the nearness of the historical Jesus we feel
that we have come into the presence of the Divine, as near as our human constitution
will permit. Again-in Jesus, faith and fact meet, and we come at once into
the presence of the human and the holy.

Eduard von Hartmann once wrote that Jesus is "a much too narrow foundation
for the erection of a religious structure." But Von Hartmann was judging
Jesus
328
more in the light of the historical background of the first century than in
the light of the nature and substance of his religious experience. This fallacy
of mistaking the form of Jesus' faith for its content is not unknown even
to-day. In the form of his faith he certainly belongs to the first century
where he remains firmly imbedded as a man of history. But the substance of
Jesus' faith is superhistorical. It is solid and sound to the core for, to
use a principle of Kant, it is capable of universalization. The religious
experience of Jesus is not outgrown. It i's the most abiding value of our
human history, as commanding and adequate to-day as it was in 30 A. D. We
have yet fully to comprehend the religious experience of Jesus and all that
it involves for our human life. Religion in his experience leaves no phase
of human life and living untouched; it strikes down to the very sourcesprings
of our existence and lays hold on the elemental forces of life in a way and
to a degree that offers the only hope for man's future on earth as reasonably
religious and righteous.

Religion is a serious matter in human life and experience. Its presence or
absence makes itself felt, and life is different. Religion of a high order
does result in respectability of life, but respectability is not religion.
Respectability is not resourceful enough to rely on in time of crisis. When
elemental human instincts, impulses and passions are aroused, whether of the
individual or of the group, there is need of something that will carry us
out beyond ourselves and the opinions of others and furnish us with powers
of inhibition, guidance and control. The Western World ascribes to Jesus a
theoretical authority, but it does not accord him an actual authority. It
rises instantly against those who dare question the author-
329
ity of Jesus, but it feels no obligation to order its actual existence after
his way of life-an attitude of impersonal rather than personal devotion. If
we interpret religion and the part it is to play in human life as Jesus seems
to have interpreted it, we shall have to say that Christianity, even at its
best, has as yet touched not more than the periphery of our existence.

We to-day must reconstruct our religion, not in the light of Paul, or John,
or of later accepted and official dicta, but in the light of the religious
experience of Jesus himself. Christianity will never be true to its best genius,
it will never accomplish its real work in the world until it has the courage
to undertake such a reconstruction. The hope of Christianity and its contribution
to our human life is not a rigorous restriction of what may or may not be
believed about Jesus, but in an unreserved release of all our powers to believe
with him. It is to share his religious experience and faith that Jesus calls
us over the tumults of theology, over the confusion of controversy and conflict.
And a resolute return to him will require courage to overcome all obstacles,
not the least of which will be our own selves and the delusion of our religious-
ness.

If Jesus is to be taken at all, he is to to be taken seriously. Surely we
are not supersensitive souls whose constitution is not sufficiently strong
to appropriate and assimilate the solid subject-matter which is offered us
in the form of his religious experience. Surely we are capable of facing the
facts and fighting our way back to that great contribution which he has to
make. If we are going to be religious, let us be really religious in the sense
of Jesus.
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What is the preacher to preach and, with his preaching, live? What is the
layman to live and, by his living, preach? The answer is simple and clear:
the religion, the personal piety, of Jesus which he himself sought to share
with his followers.

Jesus came to cast fire upon the earth, that mysterious element of his own
East, the fireof his faith. (Luke 12, 49.) Into our human history Jesus has
hurled a firebrand. Men may relate themselves to it as they will, but it continues
to burn, igniting the fires of judgment upon our human delinquency and wickedness,
but for those who have the courage to snatch it up, it illuminates the way
out. The very fact that Jesus lived-human, historical, religious-for ever
forbids that life should go on unchanged, without elevation, enrichment and
enhancement, unless we are to be overtaken by that most terrible of human
maladies, a creeping paralysis of the religious consciousness.

Who was Jesus? This study has sought to show on the basis of the New Testament,
the history and psychology of religion, that Jesus was a religious subject,
an experient of religion, the most religious personality, the possessor of
the richest and most resourceful religious experience of our human history.
The author is not ready to say who Jesus was, all that he was; but he feels
that Jesus is religiously sufficient for all our human needs. He feels that
we may actually trust Jesus in the most serious matter of our human experience,
that of living life religiously. He also feels just as strongly that Jesus
is entirely too intense a personality to be cramped within
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the narrow confines of intellectual concepts. He strikes the whole of our
life, not just the thinking process. The Christian task is not to define Jesus,
but to demonstrate him to all who know him not.